• by April 24, 2006

Mochila, an on-demand, online-based media marketplace, is coming out of stealth mode this week. The new service is using Ad:Tech in San Francisco on April 26 to focus on its ad-supported model and announce two new publishers to its network. Keith McAllister, Mochila's CEO, says the company expects to make announcements regularly as it adds publishers.

Mochila, as the Minute noted a few weeks ago, is an online bazaar for all kinds of content that buyers can purchase on an a la carte basis. Mochila offers content from newspapers, magazines, Web sites, along with video, audio, and photo content.

The key differentiator with Mochila is that it simplifies what can be a complex licensing process. "We focused on what was difficult about buying and selling content for publishers, and it was the licensing that was the problem. How do you make it easy for people to reach these new markets and new opportunities? That's the question," McAllister says.

"We give content owners syndication tools they've never had before," notes McAllister, a former CNN executive who became Mochila's CEO last September. "The barriers to [content] syndication are the complexities of licensing. It's hard... it involves phone calls, faxes, and lawyers," along with pricing issues, frequency of publication, and more. Mochila's strength as a peer-to-peer content syndication network is also that it can serve publishers of all sizes and deliver incredibly targeted or niched content.

Here's how Mochila works; The system's XML-based technology enables sellers to create and store content on the network. Sellers put a price on a piece of content, choose licensing rules, and list any embargoes, or other restrictions. Rules and restrictions can be customized down to the individual content asset.

A Mochila buyer logs into the system and searches for content. The buyer finds the desired content and reviews the material (text, photo, illustration, audio, video, etc.), price, and licensing terms. The buyer can also review the history and credibility of the content and the seller.

Mochila says it offers online advertising and revenue-sharing opportunities. For example, Mochila buyers can choose to accept advertising and its related revenue. When a buyer accepts advertising, content is free, and the revenue from the advertising is shared among the buyer, seller, and Mochila. The business model is transaction-based, but the company is working to develop an ad-supported business.

"If you're an auto advertiser, you can choose to associate at a content category level, brand name level, publication level, or down to an individual article," McAllister says. "We launched with the content sales model, but by midsummer, we'll be talking about and demonstrating our ad-supported model. The ad goes with the content wherever it wants to go." Sounds like a contextual advertising model in the making. McAllister believes that Mochila presents an incremental opportunity for any large or small media organization, and he welcomes them all. "I think the media buying community needs to know that there's going to be an exciting new option in terms of context and relevance and something that's not been available before. They'll have new and kind of unprecedented control over what happens with their ads."

Mochila is an idea whose time has come. Think of all those licensing and syndication deals Yahoo does to fill its content well in news, finance, and other channels. Think too of venues like the Associated Press, the world's oldest news gathering organization, which aggressively licenses its superior content. But consumer and trade magazines are also great prospects. They say print is dying, but as long as there is a Mochila, there's an incentive to move off death's doorstep. And what about all the original content on the Web? There's no reason it can't live on. No content should be so perishable.